Happy March. The rain has been steady and insistent—rivers overflowing, streets flooding, both of our dogs look permanently like waterlogged Paddington Bears in their yellow slickers.

Still, last week while walking to Alley Cat, there were two solid hours of sun, which is exactly what you want in the Mission, which is colorful and steams with a heat that isn’t ever a reality for San Francisco: for this part of the city to be somehow hotter than the rest of it. An open-faced sky.

The two hours of sun, plus the two bulbs finally emerging from my tulip bed, are offering a bit of respite: March will be easier, if only because it signifies the end of Winter, which has felt particularly long and sad this year.

When the rainy season hits, I find myself dreaming of the high desert. Tuscon, my grandmother’s old, flat ranch house with the baskets large enough to hold my child body, cold terra cotta tiles that matched the shapely ones curving like fault lines on the roof. Cacti with their arms in the air, holding atop their heads screech owl nests and bats and colorless flowers.

Instead, because it’s clearly a year to stay close to home, I find myself going on weekend trips to places I loved as a child, places that signaled to me, when we moved from Southern California to Northern in the late-nineties, that we’d found abundance in the form of rocky shorelines and tide pools.

My mom, sister, and I took my niece and nephew to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium at the beginning of February, a belated Christmas present. We rented a little house in Seaside, and cooked, and played endless games of Uno, and gave each other nicknames, and spent one rainy day combing the streets of Cannery Row, eating salt water taffy and looking at the leggy jellyfish and seizing any moment when the sun disentangled itself from the clouds.

My favorite exhibit has always been the giant female octopus, even if she has crammed herself into invisibility in spaces the size of a bell jar.

Octopodes are extraordinarily smart, though that isn’t exactly why I admire them. I love them because they are seemingly equal parts fierce and vulnerable.

An octopus can make her skin raised or bumpy, change color, turn to spikes, or do anything necessary in order to match the landscape around her, by controlling the projections on her papillae. While this is a feature of both male and female octopodes, it is usually the female who deploys this skill, turning to a one-woman battalion if her young are threatened.

They have three hearts. Their blood is blue. Octopuses are boneless, which is how they can wedge themselves into jars, behind tight coral or curl around objects or plants in the sea.

Octopus mating rituals are nothing special. Many marine biologists have remarked that they look like “they’re just going about their business.” No pomp. The male octopus has a mating arm, which he extends and inserts into a cavity on the female octopus, keeping his distance lest she try to ensnare and strangle him.

“The males have a host of tricks to survive the mating process,” says Katherine Harmon Courage of BBC Earth. “Some of them can quite literally mate at arm’s length. Others sneak into a female’s den disguised as another gal, or sacrifice their entire mating arm to the female and then make a hasty retreat.” 

Female octopodes are larger and hungrier than their male counterparts. It’s every bit as likely that they’ll mate with a male as strangle and eat him. Conversely, the females die shortly after laying their many eggs, dissolving their own bodies to feed their young. Joan Halifax uses this as an example of pathological altruism in her book “Standing on the Edge”.

As I stood at the edge of her tank at the aquarium, which was covered with small, white, rectangular signs that featured a picture of a camera with an X drawn through it and words reading “DO NOT FLASH THE OCTOPUS”, I watched men of all sizes and shapes shine their iPhones directly in her one visible eye. I thought about the lines from the Mary Szybist poem:

The Lushness of It 

It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you—
not that it wouldn’t reach for you 
with each of its tapering arms:

you’d be as good as anyone, I think,
to an octopus.  But the creatures of the sea,
like the sea, don’t think

about themselves, or you.  Keep on floating there,
cradled, unable to burn.  Abandon 
yourself to the sway, the ruffled eddies, abandon

your heavy legs to the floating meadows 
            of seaweed and feel 
                        the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea-
spray, barnacles.  In the dark benthic realm, the slippery neckton glide over
the abyssal plains: as you float, feel 
                                    that upwelling of cold, deep water touch
the skin stretched over
                          your spine.  Feel 
fished for and slapped.  No, it’s not that the octopus 
wouldn’t love you.  If it touched,

if it tasted you, each of its three 
hearts would turn red.

Will theologians of any confession refute me?
Not the bluecap salmon.  Not its dotted head.

The fourth time the flash flashed—when the octopus didn’t reach through the glass and strangle and eat the man next to me—I put my body between him and her. “You’re done here,” I said firmly. He looked at me with surprise, his own pupils large in the low light. I could see myself shining in his own pupils, arms crossed, a good foot shorter. Something moved in the blackness there, and I felt it as surely as a heart turning red: this is a man who has hit women. He looked at the people gathered around us, the children with their faces flat to the thick glass, and he walked wordlessly away.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because she is like the very best people I love: shape-shifting according to circumstance, principled in her priorities, and completely no-bullshit. When she needs to, she exercises extraordinary boundaries. At the same time, she knows when it’s time to acknowledge a great cause—in her case, the need to keep alive an entire next generation of youth.

The no-bullshit of animals means there’s no performance of self, no need to deconstruct the way a self is socialized. Maybe animals are a living manifestation of honesty.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because I have reached a level of self-awareness that includes knowing what I struggle to become.

When I was young, my adopted dad used to take the door off my room when I was in trouble, which always felt like the worst punishment imaginable. He read our emails, our diaries, listened in on our phone calls—he asked his friends around town to keep an eye on me and my sisters. When I had my first kiss in the almond orchard by my middle school, he knew about it before I even registered what had happened. Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.

Context: my adoptive dad was abusive. I got in trouble for everything from legitimate fuck-ups of youth (skipping class) to things that just bothered him (burning incense). As a manipulative, MENSA-level genius with a history of Vietnam-era warfare, my adoptive dad know exactly the kind of violation taking a door off the hinges was for a teenage girl.

Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.
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To circle back around–maybe the female octopus isn’t the best example of boundaries. However, she’s a really great example of understanding where her boundaries are. Anger, for example, is a useful tool because it shows us where our boundaries are, and thus, how they’ve been violated. And while we can’t be 100% certain that the female octopus is angry when she strangles and eats her mate (she might just be hungry, and that’s okay), she has a robust understanding of how to get where she needs to be in the world. She doesn’t care about whether or not her behavior is socially acceptable.

This is the moment where I meet and try to channel the octopus—there seems to be a lesson in this for me/us: the realization that boundaries are necessary for cultivating and protecting the work you’ve done on yourself. That psychic, emotional, physical, intellectual, romantic, platonic energy are expendable resources that all work together in an ecosystemic way.

We are taught, especially people socialized as female, that:

• we have no right to boundaries
• putting up boundaries means sacrificing love and care
• putting up boundaries means people will leave rather than invest the time to respect them
• putting up boundaries is cold-hearted, or less vulnerable than not
• putting up boundaries means you are inflexible, unavailable to change

Furthermore, that forgiveness is not only a) mandatory, but b) must look like inviting someone back into your space and life, and lastly, c) the work of the person most harmed in the situation to do and do alone.

On boundaries, the magnificent Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes says:

“What steals energy that you do not fully grant, is a thief in the house of the psyche. Whether it be a person, a place, a memory, a conversation, a meeting, or you yourself being the leaking seal around the chamber wherein the treasure is kept.

Think on these things if you lose energy easily, and make the adjustments to what you can and cannot engage with, accordingly, as you can, as is within your will and within your power.

We all have an energy range, as does a light bulb. Put too little or too much or too sustainedly or not sustainedly enough energy through the vehicle, and the light will not be the brightest as it has been constructed for/to/with/about/regarding.”

In her podcast ‘Tarot for the Wild Soul’, Lindsay Mack says this of boundaries: “The management of the fences around the property of yourself are necessary to make sure your crops and cultivated self is taken care of.”

What a concept to realize that setting boundaries is something that usually happens because you love the people involved. My friend Joey Gould insists, “’No’ is a love word.”

Here’s the not-so-secret thing about introspection in winter: the season is, itself, remarkably boundaried. You have less energy, sleep more, are more accountable to the animal of yourself because the borders of your landscape (the weather, the city, the clothes, the darker days) are starkly clear. And perhaps tulips, and sun, both respectively breaking from their bulbs and the clouds, teach us that we must hold on to the borders of ourselves even as the world around us becomes less obviously boundaried.

The lessons we learn from the female octopus may not be one of taking her boundaries as our own, but rather, understanding what our own boundaries are. What’s more: how to be both fiercely protective and generously tender at the same time.

At the long end of 1986, two households emerge and I absorb the remnants of the home that split four people open. After my parents’ separation, I am always looking around for the rest of me, making sure I am still there. I am several parts of one body, holding two homes and four people’s memories.

When the phone rings at my mother’s house, my father’s berating increases to make up for the fact that he can no longer yell at her in person. Instead of embodying different parts of myself with each parent, I begin to present all of me with my mother and a shadow of me with my father. When I am with him, I am a mistake to be corrected. Most of what comes out of my mouth is wrong, so I eventually stop talking.

In my sixth year I learn that I should never have to go to the bathroom away from home. When I need to, it’s very bad and it upsets my father, but I do not know how to stop. He asks me why I don’t go before we leave, but I don’t have to go then or I do and then I have to go again. I do not know why my body works this way, but it must be wrong because he gets very irritated and lectures me for a long time—whether we find a public restroom quickly or not.

Dinners at his house feel like sharp teeth on me. He picks at me for how I eat, how much I eat and the baby fat I gain in adolescence. I come to realize he is using meal time to poke at my brother and me; asking us questions that no kids could answer, only to laugh at us then lash out at us for getting them wrong. Eventually my brother loses patience with the picking and starts to respond back. This results in a Ping-Pong game of verbal confrontations that bounce back and forth between them and latch onto my skin, assaulting me. I want to escape to the basement or the attic but my limbs are stiff against me. My body is still though I am slowly floating away from me.

In my 13th year, my brother begins to taunt me. We are at my mother’s kitchen table when he smiles, insisting I am holding my fork wrong and people will shun me for it. I melt into my plate and realize I am being eaten down to the core of me. When I look for myself in my body, I can barely find a trace of me.

How old were you when your face fell through? Did you hold it in your hands? Did you catch it in your skin? Did you lose track of where they end and you begin?

In my 17th year, I am in my first year of college when I meet Daniela*—the older cousin of one of my best friends. She becomes part of our friend group and we’re envious when she starts dating the cute guy we’re all curious about, until we find out he pulls her hair by the root when he’s angry.

We are parked in front of the house Daniela grew up in when I notice my skin becoming heavy, as though I am falling out of myself. I feel a draft in my body as though a door has opened that cannot be closed. It is on this day that I learn from my friend, that Daniela’s brothers used to throw her down the basement stairs when they were angry. I look up and stare at the house, as if for the first time, and something cracks in my bones.

I am ripped open and that tear becomes the catalyst for my sociology project—women rappers using art to discuss gendered power dynamics and abuse. When I take the risk of telling my brother and father about it, I do not mention the door of the house, the staircase or the hair pulled from Daniela’s head. I do not tell them the focus is on Eve’s Love is Blind. I simply say that I did a presentation on women rappers using music to illuminate social issues. I explain that I worked really hard and I know my professor doesn’t care for hip-hop, but I have the sense that she might be able to look at the genre in a different light after this.

For a moment, neither of them are saying anything, but they’re both smiling and they eventually begin to laugh. They make fun of me for thinking I had an impact on my professor and I begin to disappear into the length of my hair. I sail away to all those nights at the dinner table, the staircase at Daniela’s house, and the distance from the top of that first step to the basement floor.

I imagine the door to my father’s basement, the safety of his attic and the way edges of houses hold some little girls together, but pull other ones apart. When I float back, they’re still laughing. I know how quickly they erupt when disagreement is present, so I draw a smile on my face too.

Were you tangled in your words, when your flesh fell to your ankles? Could you see yourself around? Were you stuck inside your own sound?

In the last week of my 28th year, my agoraphobia and sensory processing disorder spill out on either side of me. Preparing to get on a plane for the first time since high school, I am terrified. I am washing my hands in the airport bathroom when my mother appears, telling me it’s time to board the flight.       

I check my hair and make-up and walk back to where she and my brother are sitting, only to find him exploding at me. I try to figure out what I’ve done, but I am fading down to the seams of me. I am transported back to the ‘90s to the small apartment we shared with my mom. My skin snags on the image of him shouting in my doorway. I remember the shape of the bedroom door, the contour of his mouth, and the screams that shook my skin out. I think back to the day I found my room trashed and the way I held the damage like souvenirs. I recall the string of punches that came after I interfered with his business call; I remember the rhythm of his fists hitting my arm.

When I drift back to the airport he is still yelling, grating me down to my ankles. Apparently, my having to pee was very selfish and those two minutes I took to look myself over meant that the three of us could’ve missed our flight. As the screaming tapers off, I find the edge of my abandoned body, pick it up by the shreds and drag it onto the plane.

In the coming months I begin to wear my silence like armor. It becomes the protector of me. I find that the only way to be around my brother and father is to be a ground down version of me, an acceptable facsimile; it stands in for me as a way to survive. This makes me feel like I am not a real person or they are not real to me. I start to feel like I don’t really have a father or a brother. The two of them are essentially strangers to me, flaming things that mostly know how to rage at me.

Do you live inside the skin of you? Are you the girl behind the face? Did you find yourself in the shadow box? What’s left of you after the chase?

As my twenties begin to evaporate, I begin to part down the length of me. I feel enamored with men, but when they’re standing in front of me, it seems like there’s a wall between us. I think there must be something wrong with me that cannot be fixed or reconciled, so I eventually stop dating them—but the pull towards them remains.

When I tell my therapist about it, she asks if I am more attracted to men’s or women’s bodies. I tell her that is not the right question. I ask a friend for advice and they tell me that if I enjoy having sex with women, then I am queer. I know that is not the right answer. I feel drawn to men inside my bones, but when I get close to them, it feels like the best parts of me drop out of my body. I know there must be a reason why thinking about it makes me feel like I am holding my breath. I know there must be a reason why they light up so many parts of me, then leave me split up in messy piles.

On the raw edge of my 29th year, my long-term partner starts transitioning and something is pulled up and out of me. I begin thinking about the way people both transcend and encompass gender. I think about the way I am absorbing and categorizing gender and I begin to ask what I mean when I say I cannot connect with men. I begin to ask if I mean that I cannot connect with cis men. Like my other relationships at the time, there is unwarranted anger and an inability to show up for difficult conversations. But when I think about all the ways he is different than my recent partners, the most obvious difference on both a superficial and spiritual level is that he isn’t a girl.

I freeze into myself when I think about the way our relationship took shape. We are best friends and it is New Year’s Eve—one week after my 27th birthday.

He’s coming from work as a bartender, but I’m the one who’s been drinking. He starts a violent argument with me in the public hallway of my apartment building and I fall out to the edge of me. His words draw a fence around me, yelling that he can no longer play this “friend role.” I am confused and tired, but I understand he feels I’ve wronged him and now I owe him a right. I am drunk and drowning in this hallway. I just want it to stop. I cannot imagine losing him, so I have sex with him. When I come, it’s the kind of orgasm I wish I could take back.

I know there must be a reason why men light up so many parts of me then leave me split up in messy piles.
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Five years after the waves rush out and over our relationship, I read Jenny Lumet’s letter to Russell Simmons, and I am cut through to the other side of me. Her words are gentle but unapologetic and I am reminded of the intimacy that is having patience with Black men, even after experiencing harm at their hands. I wipe my face with my own hands and count how many years I’ve held on to things for fear that the men who have hurt me, would feel some of the same hurt if I use words to say what they have done to me.

She talks about making a trade—”just keep him calm, and you’ll get home” and I am yanked down to the tightest threads of me. I think about the way silence and sex turn into offerings when men decide you owe them something. My eyes spill out to my formative years and then back to adulthood. I remember the weight of being covered by flesh that never asked.

I think about all the times my eyes stood still while my body stiffened into a “no” because my words couldn’t do it. I’ve been making trades with trauma since I was 14.

Did you make oceans with your eyes, when your legs dropped out from under you? Do you recognize your body, when you split right down the length of you?

In the wake of 4:44, I awoke—30 years after I first swallowed my mouth closed. Three decades after one house became two, I widened out like unfolding fists. When I heard those words, “You had no father, you had the armor,” it felt as if they lived inside my fingers. When Jay Z says, “You got a daughter, gotta get softer,” I am holding both lines in both hands; I am holding the child me and the grown-up me in the skin of my palms.

I consider the way the world conflates hyper-masculinity with Blackness and vulnerability with femininity. I think about the way self-reflection is conceptualized as something men do in honor of daughters—but not wives. I remember my mother’s ability to hold my father’s rage. I think about the length of my emotional intelligence and how little I was when I learned to shut my mouth. I consider the way abuse patterns wrap around us like rope.

Of all the things that tried to split me, it was the juxtaposition of having a white mother and a Black father and the pain of being accepted by her and rejected by him that ultimately severed me in half. It was the confusion of not being Black enough for my father and feeling like I was supposed to partner with men who acted like him in order to prove that rejecting his abuse does not mean rejecting my Blackness. It was the cut of feeling so guilty; I would see his face in other people and believe I could undo what had been done to me by having it done again by them.

Feeling like men were in charge of me made me feel like my body wasn’t mine long before I knew what words like consent meant. So when it came time for me to say yes or no to a man, I would tighten into my mouth and fall out of my skin. I would later attribute it to my Selective Mutism, my Non-Verbal Learning Disability, and a confusion around my sexuality.

But my tendency to lose my words was born out of a trauma that developed from being unable to speak freely in my home as a child. And my difficulties with non-verbal communication were informed by a childhood that left me feeling like I was safer when I didn’t speak.

In my 36th year, I learn about the R Kelly sex cult accusations and several memories converge as if on cue. The idea of a man controlling women so much that he has power over their eating and going to the bathroom makes me fall backwards into my six-year-old self. I realize that I have spent my entire life being unsure if it is ok for me to speak, eat, go to the bathroom or do anything that reveals me as human around men.

You are not a shadow box, an after-thought or a vacant sketch of you.

My father did not get softer, as a result of having me. He simply reproduced what had been done to him as a child. And my brother’s ability to replicate my father’s abuse came from absorbing my parents’ dynamic and being able to identify more with losing yourself to a fit of violence, than being able to identify with the body that holds the scars after the fit.

I know now that people rage when they are disconnected from their person. Having so much rage projected onto me eventually resulted in my belief that I am too much of a person. Men regarded my most basic needs as something to get rid of. So I believed that if I wanted to be with a man, I’d have to get rid of myself.

When I was able to connect with queer and lesbian people, I thought it meant there was something queer about my attraction to masculinity. I started to think there was something inherently queer about me—something internal that exists outside of my attractions. But as my queerness became wider, it felt like the puzzle was being solved outside of me. The more I tried to grow into these understandings, the more I seemed to grow out of me.

When I learned I was dating a man, I simply thought the way in which I was attracted to men had revealed itself as a different shape. I thought my attraction to him could explain why my chemistry with cis men never translated properly. But I left the relationship still feeling like there was something wrong with me.

It is only now after spending years of my life depriving myself from relationships with all men and then cis men specifically as a way to protect myself, that I realize the only relationships I’ve ever had were replications of the abuse that led to the repression.

And most of the sexual experiences I’ve had with men reinforced that my body was theirs. So I became averse to the abuse and called it an aversion to men.

As I thaw out into the larger part of me, I know that the thing standing between myself and other people in relationships is not their gender. It’s the way my body viscerally responds to gender, since my early understandings of masculinity and intimacy were tied up in abuse. It’s about the way my skin translates injury, after years of experiences taught me to anticipate blood instead of love from men.

I am finally starting to ask if I am truly a poor fit for cis men or simply not attracted to men who act like my father and brother.

You are real raw love and gorgeous flesh. You deserve to be held like the entire shape of you.

In the aftermath of the home that broke open, I know that girls like Daniela* and I will have a steeper climb towards finding home in the arms of a man, because of what happened at the hands of men in our homes. I know that relationships aren’t about breaking somebody down or taking away their person, as a way to regain yours. I know that intimacy doesn’t feel like being trapped inside a house. I know that love doesn’t feel like the wrong side of the basement door.

When I look at the place inside me that split, I can see the wound and feel it closing. I know that people are neither good nor bad, but in a constant state of becoming. When they engage in harmful behaviors it’s because they’ve been profoundly hurt and they’re perpetuating that learning. I know unlearning is a process. I know I’ve survived both my child and adulthood due to my ability to read people who were so checked out from their person, they didn’t care if what happened next froze me out of my person.

I know that brain structure, systemic and familial post-trauma can complicate the ability to say or hear a no. I know that doesn’t make it a yes. I know the thing that causes people to control and rage is the same thing that allows them to keep going during a sexual act, after a face has gone blank. And I know I don’t owe it to anyone to be an emotional punching bag while they work through their trauma superficially through me.

On the long end of my 36th year, I figured out why that complex, primal, physical and emotional longing for men never went away. It is part of me, but it is no longer a gash on me. I am learning how to stop the blood. In the wake of my healing, I know that trying to love people in similar pain as me was an attempt to grow the skin over the cuts that once divided me.

I am not broken, but I have existed in pieces and I know that being deeply harmed during childhood is a particular kind of bruise. I have a higher level of empathy because of it and I know that empathy will translate into the highest level of love for myself as I continue to learn that I cannot love the rage out of a person. And if you are navigating that kind of trauma, you deserve to learn it too.

You deserve to be loved like survival, like the spelling of your name, like the softest whisper and the loudest yell that sounds like the entire length of you. And you deserve to hear it over and over again until you know it’s true.

At the birth of Lemonade, we awaken to images of Beyoncé alone and naked in her thoughts. All at once on a stage, in a field, in a dark room with her body contained. By this time, I am open and crying; not yet understanding everything that is being revealed, but knowing I am being stretched as she is stretched and there is such a thing as too thin. Soon we see Bey atop a building, in the vein of enough is enough. She jumps, emerging in water, floating above herself and then staring at herself, as if outside of herself.

I think about the lengths we stretch when strewn about on roofs, unable to make home out of house. Or the way our hands fold up and our knuckles bleed back, when we look in the mirror and see our reflections whole, knowing we will not be mirrored back. It is this truth and this blood, that pumps through my veins and the veins of so many Black women, honoring our family traditions of choosing partners who push us to rooftop heights and help us mimic the dynamics between our parents. When the footage spills of young Beyonce sitting on the couch with her father, there is a clarity that trickles down and collects like rain, in my thoughts. I am reminded that I was once a little girl, trying to look up to my father, imagining him without faults or at least imagining that his rage is not his fault. In this world where Black is hunted down and killed off, little girls want to believe in our Black fathers, even when they fall outside of our projections of them.

When I am 5 years old, I learn my mother is moving out and I watch her pack up her things or fold her hands back. Before I understand what this means, I know I will have to change schools. I will no longer have my own room, and I will live in an apartment, walking distance to the new school. When my brother walks me to my class on the first day, for the first time, I am fully aware that my parents are Black and White. I am one of two brown girls in the class and for the first time, I am aware that my family has two distinct sides. The left side is White. The right side is Black.

If it’s what you truly want, I can wear her skin over mine…her hair over mine…
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By the time I am 12, I know I will never be good enough for my father. I will never know the right answers to his questions. He will always make fun of me for answering them. I will never know the right thing to say or not say to prevent him from blowing up. I will never have the right brain or the right emotional response. He lectures me for crying, for needing to go to the bathroom when we’re away from home. He picks at me when I’m eating. I know I will never have the right body. I will never embody Blackness in the right way, and I will never embody the right image of a Black daughter. Long after my parents are separated, I watch my mother do the emotional work of 10 women. I see that for my father, this is not enough. I begin to interpret this work as birthright, or a facet of femininity.

I begin to conceptualize my father’s behaviors as inherent to masculinity. I carry this on top of my bones until it seeps into my skin and before I know it, my relationships. In some way or form, I become an image of my mother; finally understanding why it feels like some part of my attraction always has something to do with my dad. I enter all my relationships with the caveat that I am a shell of the girl they actually want. I am unsure of why they want me, since I am not really real, but I understand that for most of them, just having my body is enough. I wear weaves for most of my twenties and think back to the images of beauty that I idolized as a child. I know I am not enough of whatever people want me to be and I will never be seen like beautiful women are. But I can wear their hair.

Why are you afraid of love? You think it’s not possible for someone like you?
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As Lemonade spills, I am cut open at my wrists, thinking about the changes we go through as Black women in relation to our hair, our bodies, our genders, our depth. When Serena Williams emerges at the top of the stairwell, I am frozen with awe at the sight of her. Not having expected any of this, I am taken by her, as if watching her for the first time. The loud clap of her hips or the quiet glow of her skin, hushing me between my eyes. Not a word can be said that would truly describe the soft shock of her beauty, but I am sobbing at her image because she is all that is beautiful and delicious and yet the world has accused of her of being too Black for pretty. In the next moment, Beyoncé sits atop a throne, as if she has risen above her tears or the entire height of that roof. Serena is beaming next to her, casually reminding us that Black women are the deepest, truest reach of raw and resilience.

I am 26 when I meet him, and I am at a crossroads with my identity. I have dated men for 13 years, but my only real relationship has been with a woman. We start out as best friends and he texts me one day: I am in love with you. I do not know how to respond. After all, I am just a shell. I do not think anybody has ever been in love with me. I am confused about why he is. I tell him I am not in love with him; he tells me that I am. I try to make a thing work that is not workable because I want to be in love. I want to be loved. And he says he madly, deeply wants me. I want somebody to want me. We date for many years.

In “Love Drought,” the beauty of perseverance stuns me back open again. It is not always about strength, but I think when we want something and we believe it is good for us, it is a testament to the love we have for ourselves, to keep trying. The biggest, most recurring argument he and I ever had, was about the discrepancy between our emotional capacities, likely due to our differences in socialization and our opposite experiences of being taken care of versus caring for. “I will never be where you’re at!” he’d snap. When I ask him to tell me what he likes about me, he says that I know, but I don’t. I know that he thinks I am smart, because he hates me for it.

I know that he thinks I am beautiful, because he tells me every time we get back together, and several times a year, when he is mad and presents it as an accusation. It is one of many reasons that proves I will eventually leave him. When he starts arguments that last all night, I plead with him that I need to sleep. He asks if I just want to forget the whole relationship. I know that I am in charge of stopping the blood and creating the injury. I wonder if I can ever really exist in a relationship. I wonder if shells get broken when they’re crushed, or if they just keep shattering.

Do you remember being born? Are you thankful for the hips that cracked? The deep velvet of your mother, and her mother, and her mother?
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In the black and white flood of the body of forgiveness, Beyoncé lays in the water, having marched with the strength of a thousand women, preparing for her own baptism. I think about how many arms it takes to heal a bleeding man, who won’t even look at his own wound.

When I am in my late twenties, I ask my mother why she married my father, as if he is some unknown person who has nothing to do with me. He gets worse with age or stays the same and I get better or older and realize I cannot tolerate this kind of psychological abuse and still be okay. I realize this lifetime of disconnect is not a normal way to experience relationships. I realize I cannot talk in front of him, so I stop. I am catapulted back to first grade, now knowing there is language for the severe anxiety, Selective Mutism, and for the hysterical crying that alienated me from other kids. By the time I am in my mid-thirties, my mother says she married her mother. I raise my voice at her one day, telling her she doesn’t understand the abuse dynamics on the entire right side of my family, because she never had to walk on eggshells or contain herself in a small space.

She tells me she has and I realize that my maternal grandmother is not just a shell that bandages scraped knees and makes Daffodil cakes. She is my mother’s mother and she has always been somewhat critical and controlling, it was just less directed at me. And I admit to myself that my standards for psychological abuse are colored by my relationship with my father and have always served as a scale for comparison: Is this better or worse than this? In my 33rd year, my therapist, who I’m not getting along with, brings herself to be honest for a brief moment and stares at me directly. She tells me I have trouble knowing my limits with people because of my history — you have a high tolerance for difficult people. I am shocked she admits this. I have known this since age 5. By fifth grade, people tell me I should be a therapist. This is both a compliment and a sad story.

Am I talking about your husband or your father?
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The memories I have of my paternal grandmother are mostly of baked mac and cheese and picking at my father. I realize my father is a son and my grandmother had a father. One of the clearest memories I have is listening to her in the backseat of my father’s car. We are traveling from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn to Maplewood, New Jersey, and she is sitting in the seat in front of me. They argue the entire trip and I dissociate. I imagine these people are not my relatives and I am not part of this family. My real parents are the two car seats in front of me. I am not a girl, but an object that cannot feel; perhaps I am the backseat. They are loud and the car is filled with arms. I am buried by them or choking because of them, but I cannot find my mouth.

Seven years later, I am in a relationship that has way too many arms. He tries to make me a backseat. I stay with him, even after I realize we are igniting each other. I am split between what he never got from his mother and my little girl self, afraid to have a mouth. He is the fire of my father and what will become of my future son, if I accept his promise ring. I realize I do not want to give birth to a car seat. I want my children to be whole people with words in their mouths. I do not want them to be octopus or fear octopus, every time their other parent gets angry. I want them to be able to breathe. And I realize I cannot co-parent with somebody who has enough arms or enough breath to fill an entire car.

I want to model healthy love for my future daughter. I don’t want her to think masculinity is a thing to fear. I don’t want her to think femininity can heal things that are cut open, without the wounded person so much as bandaging their own wound. By the 5th year, I know this is the last round. The first time we have an honest conversation about our relationship, when he is not simply arms and breath, I tell him he is not healthy for me. I explain that I am not a backseat and I cannot drive the car. He pauses. “Do you think I am like your father?” I am surprised. “Yes. I thought you knew that.” I realize this is the truest and worst thing I have ever said to anyone. He tells me he would cry, if he could.

When Lemonade pours into “Sandcastles,” I am crying hard. Jay Z is first facing Beyoncé and then we eventually see Sybrina Fulton, Lesley McSpadden, and Gwen Carr, holding pictures of their sons. In their laps, they carry the entire weight of being a mother to a Black son in this world. I clutch my skin and remember that Jay Z is a son and a full person, capable of great harm and great love. I resolve to say that we are all capable of that, and yet we all deserve the chance to evolve past what we know to be true about ourselves and other people. I do not know what will happen now between the two of them, but I know they have gone through something that will change both of them and eventually, Blue Ivy too.

I know she is not a car seat. She cannot escape the relationship between her parents, or their parents. But in this moment, I have the sense that we will all be okay. When I see Jay chasing her around the field, I remember back to the “cough-up-a-lung” Jay Z and I think of the Marcy Projects, where my father is also from. As if looking at him for the first time, I realize that he was once a child and he is now somebody’s father. I remember that line from “Anything”: “As a man, I apologize for my dad.” And I think about how much I sobbed when he released “Glory”: “Baby, I paint the sky blue, my greatest creation was you.” I remember that love begets growth or growth begets love. I remember that all wounds eventually close. I remember that we are made to heal.

Pull me back together again, the way you cut me in half…
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The paint on the walls echoed, on the last day we saw each other. The apartment floors were holding their breath. I know I cannot escape what we created. But I can escape the backseat. It is between July and August and he is about to turn 33, but I surround him, like he is a child — perhaps the child I am afraid I will birth if I do not leave this car. I tell him that we did not come together by accident. I must’ve chosen him before I came into this life. I do not tell him that it was through his love that I learned what I didn’t want in a relationship. I do not tell him that it took the mess and the cut of this incision to help me define what is and isn’t healthy love. It is not a hot space or a trapped car. It is a quiet, lengthy, soothing offering that builds a space like home. I look at him, as if for the first time. “I will never be with you again.”

There is a thing to learn about lemons, if you really like lemonade. They are bitter and sour and they will make you scrunch your face. But if you squeeze them out with precision and add enough sweet, they will turn into something else. It was through the slicing of this fruit, that I learned that relationships aren’t supposed to be this hard. I became the sour, nursing the cut of my left and right sides. This juice is in my blood. It is underneath my skin, on the underside of me. But it will not slice the rest of me. Too much of me has been cut open for me to think I am meant to be in parts.

I am what happens after the juice is squeezed and the yellow tastes sweet. It took seeing my father so clearly in another person to legitimize what I knew to be true about my own mouth. If you slit open my stomach now, you will find words upon words and unborn daughters writing poetry in my womb. You will find a healing wound that opened, when I opened. And you will find that I opened the widest when I learned that my attraction to octopus masculinity was causing me to lose my own mouth. The same arms that once choked, led me to learn how to put myself back together. And I am no longer attracted to lemons. But I am glad for the lemonade.

*Editor’s note: All subheads hail from Warsan Shire’s poetry from Lemonade.